So far the retail sale offered the real product to be purchased by the customer.
In the field of online sale via the internet, a virtual image of the product is available to the customer on the screen. When the product is delivered, there is often a discrepancy in the coloring; correspondingly high are the returns rates in the field of online sale. For example, clothes returns after often reasoned by “does not fit”, followed by “color of product not as expected”.
The reason for a different color display of the products on different screens are the technical variety of the screens as well as the different settings chosen by the user and by the programs, for example in respect of brightness, contrast and/or coloring.
So far, it has been technically complex to calibrate screens or to bindingly display colors in industrial applications. In this context, color measuring apparatus determining the screen colors and software correcting the colors by means of the measured values are used.
Due to the high price and the remarkable technical complexity, such solutions are inappropriate for the above-described consumer area. Apart from that, the systems are adapted merely for high-class screens. Displays of mobile end devices, such as of smartphones or of tablets, cannot be calibrated in this way.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,439,722 B1 discloses a method for calibrating a screen by means of colored foils (saturated red, green and blue). The foils are arranged on the white background of the screen and visually compared with similar overlaid color fields. However, the human eye does not clearly recognize color differences of saturated colors for which reason this method is not very exact.